2016 Issue

known as Uni. That claim of prestige is un- derpinned by the accomplishments of Uni’s alums which include three Nobel Laureates (in Physics, Medicine and Economics), a Pulitzer Prize winner, an Olympic Medal winner, a Tony Award winner, a US Ambas- sador, and a Miss America (also a former candidate for US Congress and Harvard JD). One of the former faculty is known as the father of New Math. Most major universities cannot claim such grand alumni accomplishment. The class of 1972 institu- tionalized this tradition with the Wild Q Chicken Award for spontaneous creativity. Several now accom- plished software alumni from Uni sat on panels on the 2010 Computer History Museum sessions on PLATO. Brian Dear delivered the keynote address at the Computer History Museum. Brian Deer is still writing his detailed book about PLATO (personal communication with Brian Dear 15 Dec 2015) [11], and it promises to eclipse Markoff’s Stanford-centric version of the computing story. David Woolley (Uni class of ‘72) began programming on PLATO in 1973 and wrote its early networked email and chat programs. Ray Ozzie (now at Mi- crosoft) is notable for inventing Lotus Notes whose roots came from PLATO. The location of the PLATO laboratory was adjacent to Uni High as shown in Figure 3. This author completed a bachelor’s de- gree in what was then known as General Engineering housed in the Transportation Building, also adjacent to the building that housed PLATO. (The figure only shows primarily the engineering portion of the campus. Most of the campus is to the south of Green Street (320 buildings on the main campus, over 600 total buildings)) [8]. Relevant to this audience, the Univer- sity of Illinois library is the second largest university library in the United States and the fifth largest library in the United States if government libraries are included. Much of the PLATO education software is still available free through an emulator thanks to a group of dedicated volunteers at Cyber1.org (Paul Konig et al) and VCam- pus Corporation (personal communication, Paul Konig, 3 Feb 2015). The PLATO emula- tor (Pterm) logon screen appears as Figure 4. The amber color mimics the appearance of the original plasma terminals. Educational subjects appear as Figure 5. An example of a lesson first page appears above (top). One of the graphical screens in the lesson displays the graphics in 1977 on PLATO (bottom). INNOVATION AND TRENDS The review of the marvelous history of early software and hardware and management innovations that created PLATO should circle the reader’s attention back to the previous discussion of trends. That sec- tion introduced motivations of trends due fashion (populism), business mythology (the next big thing) and technical progress (technology trajectory). All notable modern innovation contains these three elements. Innovations can be further sorted as incre- mental, architectural and radical innova- tions [27]. Incremental innovation includes Figure 3 - Enginering Campus UIUC Figure 4 - PTerm logon screen (with permission) Figure 5 - Academic subjects screen (with permission) TECHNOLOGY | continued from page 33 34